What's So Special About Me?
by GoddessofSnark
Summary: It was an innocent enough question that she asked, but she didn't expect the sad tale that would come from it. LucyRomano friendship.


A/N: Alright, so this is an angsty little thing, but it was a plot bunny that refused to let go of my calf. Stubborn little thing, seemed it liked the way Romano had a heart with Lucy and wanted me to expand on it. Takes place about a few days before Be Still My Heart.   
  
"Wait!" She called after the retreating form. He turned around and looked at her. "What's so different about me? What's better about me, why do you care so much? Why do you treat me better than everyone else?" She questioned him. She felt him stare at her for a long hard minute.   
  
"You have what it takes." He said simply, turning around and walking away. He heard her hurried footsteps as she came up after him.   
  
"There's more to it than that, and don't tell me there isn't. The only other person here you treat even halfway decently is Dr. Corday, why do you treat me differently? What's so special about me?"  
  
"Miss Knight, why do you want to know so badly?" He said approaching the OR.   
  
"Because, you don't think anyone here is worth your time except for Doctor Corday and I." She pointed out. He scrubbed in before he turned to her, carefully formulating his response.   
  
"If I wanted to tell you, I would." He said, as he stalked in to the operating room. "I have a man here with a torn liver, I suggest you move along." He said walking through the OR doors, leaving her behind. He found that while the surgery went well, and was routine, his mind was miles away. He thought of her, and how she'd make a great doctor, a great surgeon. She was the closes thing that he could get to a pug to fill the hole in his heart, her and his Lizzie.   
  
She filled the void that he had in his soul, and so did Lizzie. Lucy would make such a magnificent doctor, she knew how to treat a patient, not just diagnose someone and give them some medicine, but how to really treat them, how to make them feel comfortable, and how not to give up even when she had the deck stacked against her, and no one wanted to help. She still fought hard to save anyone who walked through those doors, even if they had no hope.   
  
It was his last surgery of the day, and he was glad when it was over. All he wanted was to go home and pour himself a stiff drink. She had to ask that question on this day, she had to bring up the painful memory he had all but repressed. He knew exactly what was so special about her, but he wouldn't tell her, he couldn't tell her, he couldn't bring himself to think of what had happened again. He couldn't bring himself to remember something that he'd been battling with for the past fifteen years.   
  
But even once he got home, even once he had finished off his first glass of scotch, he found the memories to still be coming back to him, in fact, the more he drank, the clearer they were. His thoughts were interrupted by a knock at the door, and Gretyl's eager barking. He told the dog to shut up, and walked over to the door, to see him standing there. "Ms. Knight, to what do I owe the pleasure, another patient of yours that no one else wants to treat?" He asked, staring at her from the door.   
  
"No, Dr. Romano, actually I came to apologize, I realized that I had something that ticked you off earlier-" She started.   
  
"That you did." He intterrupted, but he let her continue.   
  
"So I just wanted to say sorry for whatever I did." He laughed a slightly drunken laugh, but stepped back from the door. She was a truly good hearted person, she'd make a great doctor.  
  
"Do you still want to know the answer to your question earlier?" He asked her, giving her room to step inside if she wished. She thought for a moment. She could smell the scotch on his breath, but decided to take her chances with him.   
  
"Well, yes." She said honestly, and she took the step inside, and he closed the door behind her.   
  
"You want something to drink? I was in the middle of drowning myself in a bottle of scotch before you arrived." He said, gesturing to the bottle and the tumbler on the coffee table in the living room. "I've got scotch, coffee, tea, beer." He rattled off the contents of his kitchen in a way only a man who bordered between drunk and sober could.  
  
"A beer sounds good." She said, and he dissapered into the kitchen before coming back out with a beer.  
  
"Make yourself comfortable, I'll be right back." He said, before retreating up the stairs to the second bedroom. He looked at himself in the mirrored dreser that stood in there, and ran a hand over his face before he reached into the dresser and pulled out the tattered album. He looked himself in the eyes and told himself that he could do this, that he could show this to her, that he could open himself up to someone else, that he didn't have to go through all of this himself.   
  
He came back down the stairs and tossed the album next to her on the couch, before taking his favourite seat in the lazy boy that was next to the couch, and reclined in it, before pouring himself another glass of scotch. He'd let her try and figure things out on her own, she was a bright girl, she could figure things out on her own. She didn't need him to peice things together for her, the pictures told it all, the pictures told her everything she wanted to know.   
  
She flipped through the album, taking in every photo. She couldn't fail to notice the resemblence. She couldn't fail to notice the joy eminating from the pages, and the sulleness, the somber sorrorow eminating from the man who sat just feet away from her. She looked up and found him staring into space, idly sipping on the glass of scotch. She flipped to the last page of the album, before she set it down next to him, and took a long swig from the bottle in front of her.   
  
"You're just like her." He said, breaking the silence that had fallen. "Sweet, caring, stubborn." A faint smile crossed his lips, the smile of a man trying to kid himself. "Y'know, that was why I became a doctor." He gestured at the album. She just listened. If there was one thing she had learned from her psych rotation, it was that listening was always the best option. Listening allowed her to see what was really bothering someone, and it let the person get things off their chest.  
  
"It's been fifteen years, fifteen exactly. You'd be about her age." He pointed out. She nodded, just watching, watching and listening. "She was what made me become a doctor. She had wanted to be one, I thought the least I could do would be to let her live vicariously through me." He was staring down at his glass, looking at his reflection in the amber liquid.   
  
"I'm sorry." She said quietly, but made no move to go.  
  
"Don't be. You didn't know her, it wasn't your fault." He said quietly, draining the last remains of the glass and pouring himself a new one. "No one's fault really." He said, and she couldn't help but feel his pain. She didn't see the so called evil surgeon that most believed him to be, she had already seen his nice side, he had already proven to her that he did have a heart, that he could be nice. What she saw was a grieving man, a man who'd been grieving for fifteen years, who never let anybody know his pain.   
  
"I very nearly went into peds, or oncology." He said chuckling. "Then I realized that with those you have less control. With surgery, you literally hold someone's life in your hands. You play god." He said. She knew exactly what he was talking about as well. The ER, pediatrics, oncology, you got patients who you couldn't do anything for, and you passed them off to surgeons, or you passed them on down the line, as a surgeon, you could kill someone if you wanted to, or you could save their lives.   
  
If you wanted to, you could kill a man, for no reason. And make it look like a simple accident, one small mistake and you'd snuff out their life. Or you could revive them from the boundries of death. "Oncology, well, I just couldn't stand to see others, other children, other people so similar, other people who know that they're a time bomb, just counting down the minutes til they die." He said. His voice had dropped to a hoarse whisper now.   
  
"What was her name?" She asked, flipping through the photo album again.   
  
"Mallory." He said quietly. She didn't have to ask what had happened to her, his preivous statement had told her everything she needed to know. He took another sip of the scotch. It was what, his third? Fourth? He didn't care, he wasn't going anywhere, he didn't care how drunk he was either. "I was young, I was reckless, I was stupid, but she really made me reevaluate my life. I'd finally found someone who'd love me, and then came Mallory, sooner than either of expected."  
  
He was back to talking to his reflection in the glass again. "Jane, she hadn't wanted Mallory, she said she couldn't handle having a kid." He said, gesturing to the other woman that cropped up at various points in the photo album. "I said that I could, and I did. She didn't want to..." he searched for a halfway decent word to use "...cancel things. But she didn't want to have to take care of her either."   
  
"So you took on the full responsibility?" He nodded.   
  
"Yeah, I did. She stopped by every now and then to be a mom, but most of the time I was on my own." He looked at the album, and flipped through it himself. "Mallory was the only stable thing that I had, I was in and out of jobs, there wasn't much for a nineteen year old who was in the local community college trying to get some sort of a degree. I wound up being an RN just to make ends meet." He said laughing, knowing how much he acted as if he hated the nurses now. "And then Mallory started to get sick, and that's when I was glad that I could do something for her." He said, and while his voice had picked up a little previously, it had dropped back down to the hoarse whisper again.   
  
"I brought her to three different doctors in the ER, and they all said the same thing." He paused for a moment to take a drink. He noticed her bottle was empty. "Want another?" he said, gesturing to the bottle on the table, but she shook her head. She didn't want to interrupt him. She wanted to hear everything he had to say, because she had a feeling he'd never told anyone this before.   
  
"What was it?" She asked quietly. He looked at her, and she was about to apologize before she realized that it wasn't anger in his eyes, but pain.   
  
"Rhabdomyosarcoma." He said, almost choking over the long word. "66 percent survival rate, but Mallory was one of the unfortunate thirty four percent." He said, draining the rest of his glass. "She spent so much time in and out of a hospital, that was all she wanted to do, she wanted to help those like her, she wanted to help the others that she saw when she was in the hospital." She could see the pain, and the wetness in his eyes. She knew how hard it must be for him to open up and tell anyone.  
  
"It was the least I could do, I started taking classes, started in med school. I was still an RN, and could barely pay for anything, but I was determined to be a doctor, only for her." He had finally giving up trying to hold back the tears and she watched as they traced a dark, salty path down his cheeks. "I graduated two days before-" he couldn't bring himself to say things. "She could barely sit up, but she still came to the graduation, She still showed up to see me become a doctor." He said, laughing slightly. "If she was anything, she was stubborn. Even then, she still thought she had a chance, she still thought she could beat it."   
  
"And then two days later, I was about to start my first day as a resident, when I found myself not being able to leave her bedside. You'll never know love until you have a kid, there's something so powerful about it. Ask anyone about love and they'll come up with a sappy love poem, but what love is, is being there, knowing that God had put an angel on earth to save you when you think that you're nothing more than a down and out junkie looser who can't get a hold of his life who knocked up some random girl that he barely knew and then realized that he wanted to have a kid. Love is sitting in a chair in a hospital room for three days straight, and the doctors don't bother you because you've you made it obvious that visiting hours don't apply to you. And you never know what pain is until you loose the person that you felt all that for." He said, crying again, and the emotion that he had was enough to bring tears to her eyes as well.   
  
"She died that day, just drifted off in her sleep." He flipped to the last page, an assortment of photos of the little girl in a coffin, looking just as pretty as she had in life, flowers strewn around. "At least she didn't go down in pain." He said, laughing at the irony of it. "After something like that, you really can't feel again." He said, putting the album down on the coffee table.   
  
"That's it?" She questioned. "I remind you of her?" He nodded.   
  
"You're just like her. It's as if someone wanted me to get over fifteen years of grieving by putting someone so similar right in front of me." He said. "And you're just like her, nice, charming, smart, stubborn. You're the person she never got to be."  
  
"Dr. Romano?" She questioned. He looked at her. "Are you alright." He smiled and nodded.  
  
"I've never told anyone that before." She nodded at him.   
  
"I figured."  
  
"You'd make a great doctor Lucy, keep it up, and you'll go far." He told her, finally setting the glass he'd spent most of the night staring into on the table.   
  
"Thank you. I'm sorry." Before he could tell her again that she didn't have to be she had gotten up and slid out the door, leaving him alone.   
  
As she walked down the snowy Chicago streets, she smiled through the glaze that had settled in her eyes. Her boss, the evil Robert Romano, bane of Cook County General Hospital had a heart, and he was a truly nice man, who'd just been hurt. And she'd been there to listen to his tale, thankful for her psych rotation. She had been the one to listen, and then she had gotten the ultimate compliment, he told her that she'd suceeed, and coming from Romano, that was something to be proud of. And she had found out why she got prefferential treatment, she found out what made her special, and while it saddened her to think about it, she was glad that she could help someone out, if only if it was to let years of pain out. 


End file.
